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The purpose of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside
Samuel Johnson
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Samuel Johnson
Age: 75 †
Born: 1709
Born: September 18
Died: 1784
Died: December 13
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Lichfield
Staffordshire
Dr Johnson
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More quotes by Samuel Johnson
To live without feeling or exciting sympathy, to be fortunate without adding to the felicity of others, or afflicted without tasting the balm of pity, is a state more gloomy than solitude it is not retreat, but exclusion from mankind. Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.
Samuel Johnson
Women have two weapons - cosmetics and tears
Samuel Johnson
It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.
Samuel Johnson
The balls of sight are so formed, that one man's eyes are spectacles to another, to read his heart with.
Samuel Johnson
Life, to be worthy of a rational being, must be always in progression we must always purpose to do more or better than in time past.
Samuel Johnson
I remember a passage in Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, which he was afterwards fool enough to expunge: I do not love a man who is zealous for nothing.
Samuel Johnson
Scarcely any degree of judgment is sufficient to restrain the imagination from magnifying that on which it is long detained
Samuel Johnson
A woman of fortune being used the handling of money, spends it judiciously but a woman who gets the command of money for the first time upon her marriage, has such a gust in spending it, that she throws it away with great profusion.
Samuel Johnson
Faults and defects every work of man must have.
Samuel Johnson
...it will not always happen that the success of a poet is proportionate to his labor.
Samuel Johnson
Tears are often to be found where there is little sorrow, and the deepest sorrow without any tears.
Samuel Johnson
I wish you would add an index rerum, that when the reader recollects any incident he may easily find it.
Samuel Johnson
He who praises everybody, praises nobody.
Samuel Johnson
Order is a lovely nymph, the child of Beauty and Wisdom her attendants are Comfort, Neatness, and Activity her abode is the valley of happiness: she is always to be found when sought for, and never appears so lovely as when contrasted with her opponent, Disorder.
Samuel Johnson
Shame arises from the fear of men, conscience from the fear of God.
Samuel Johnson
All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.
Samuel Johnson
Vanity is so frequently the apparent motive of advice, that we, for the most part, summon our powers to oppose it without any very accurate inquiry whether it is right.
Samuel Johnson
They make a rout about universal liberty, without considering that all that is to be valued, or indeed can be enjoyed by individuals, is private liberty.
Samuel Johnson
The wickedness of a loose or profane author is more atrocious than that of a giddy libertine or drunken ravisher, not only because it extends its effects wider, as a pestilence that taints the air is more destructive than poison infused in a draught, but because it is committed with cool deliberation.
Samuel Johnson
Being reproached for giving to an unworthy person, Aristotle said, I did not give it to the man, but to humanity.
Samuel Johnson
